Wednesday, July 30, 2014

The Washington Hotel began rising from its top of the hill location in 1890 and was originally known as the Denny Hotel, after one of the Seattle founders, Arthur Denny. Squabbling among the partners kept the hotel closed for its first three years and the Panic of 1893 did the rest, closing it for another decade. Finally, it was sold to James A. Moore whose Moore Theater stands next to it and still packs them in today. Moore’s first guest, Teddy Roosevelt, gave the hotel all the cache it needed to be successful and it was a success for the three summers of life ahead of it, before the hoses leveling what we call Belltown today washed its footings away.

Moore sold the land at the corner of Second and Stewart to two powerhouse developers who were just finishing the Alaska Building, the first true Seattle skyscraper. J. E. Chilberg and J. Crawford Marmaduke paid $200,000 for the land and had in mind a turnkey hotel project, something that could be built but not fully furnished and sold to a competent hotelier who'd finish the job.

As they closed in on the groundbreaking date, the architects, the esteemed Eames and Young from Chicago, said that another $200,000 had been added to the original $600,000 cost of the structure “because the great growth and the magnificent prospects of the city merit it,” said Mr. Eames. There were to be 350 rooms in the hotel and, the Seattle Daily Times noted, “every room will have a private bath.” The doors to the closets were to be constructed so that “when opened, the closet will be flooded with electricity.”

The Alaska Building underway
August 22, 1904
UW Collections

The construction of these new, taller buildings should be understood in the context of the San Francisco Earthquake that occurred in April, 1906. Clearly, the great city was damaged goods and the events in the Bay Area gave Seattle a strategic advantage that would ensure something more than backwater status. Also, Chilberg and Marmaduke had just finished the Alaska Building and wanted it to be seen as safe. Its all steel construction helped that point along as did the choice of Eames and Young from Chicago. Also helping was the fact that people then knew absolutely nothing about how earthquake prone their region was.

The hotel was on a schedule that would have it comfortably ready for the great world’s fair, the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition that Seattle planned first for 1908 and then delayed for a year to June of 1909. St. Louis and Portland had just completed expos celebrating the start and the end of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Now it was Seattle’s time with a fresh topic, the gold rush plus the emergence of an American Century in the Pacific. However, soon, the inevitable delays came Materials didn't arrive on time and, also, the realization that the basic business scheme devised by Chilberg and Marmaduke needed to be revisited. The destruction of San Francisco sent a strong economic shock, that reverberated across the entire western economy. Then, manipulators tried to corner the copper market which led to a collapse of copper stocks and a slowing of mining that hit the national economy in 1907. The slowing economy made the idea of finding a turnkey buyer unlikely, so Chilberg and Marmaduke turned to a public stock offering to raise the $250,000 necessary to furnish the project and install the interior spaces that would complete the hotel. The coverage at the time seemed sober and straight forward, a small wrinkle in the plan, but clearly the back story demonstrated a significant fear that Seattle could be left with another empty hotel, just like the one Arthur Denny tried to build.

Events also crowded in. A great fleet was moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and would visit Seattle in the Spring of 1908. The purpose was to demonstrate President Roosevelt’s famous saying, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." The Great White Fleet was the big stick part and sent a clear signal to Japan that the Pacific was an American lake as well. When it became clear that sometime in May, 1908 the big ships would visit, there was a possibility that the city’s new showcase hotel might not be ready. It had the potential for a world class embarrassment to a city with world class presumptions.

Chilberg and company were cutting it very close. They announced on April 19 that the New Washington would be the site of the great reception for the offices of the fleet when they arrived on May 23. The Seattle Daily Times felt it necessary to underscore the community's expectations by saying that "the reception will take place in the big hostelry which will be finished by that date."

One step ahead of the sheriff, with workers racing to complete so many details, the officers’ reception began with the admirals being led to the ornate mezzanine so they could take in the lovely lobby. They then left the mezzanine and proceeded down stairs to the dining room/ballroom where the officers formed a reception line. They would greet 3,000 people inside the hotel while an estimated 30,000 milled around outside, where music was available and the police department scanned the crowd for pickpockets.

They got some, like E. Larson, known as the “Frisco Kid” who had $125 on his person. Ike Borenstein had filched $193 and, over at the post office, Joe Medford, who tried to outrun the cops, knocking over a group of ladies and a stroller. He had $130 on him. Big money in those days.

New Washington and Moore Theater across from
grandstand on Second Avenue.
Note people standing on utility poles.
UW Collections

Then, three days later, the greatest parade ever in Seattle marched down First and up Second Avenue. The Seattle Daily Times, using a tortured analysis, had the attendees at half a million. Let’s not argue with Alden Blethen, it would be a hopeless endeavor, let’s just say there were a lot of people. They went South down First Avenue to Jackson Street, then back up the gentle slope on Second Avenue where they went by the official bandstand located across the street from the New Washington and the Moore Theater. Organizers had roped off the sidewalks from the parade route, using 33,000 feet of half inch rope.

Original Poster

The military part of the parade was all starched uniforms and crisp, shouted orders, but the civilian part was down home. The City of Aberdeen brought 16 black bear cubs who were to be escorted along the route by the 16 fattest men in Aberdeen. A view of the parade route by the bear escorts led to a change in plans due to the rigor of the march and the long climb north on Second Avenue. Younger, thinner men escorted the Teddy Bears along the streets. After the parade, each of the 16 battleships received a bear cub as a mascot.

The hotel that Chilberg and Marmaduke made spanned the two World’s Fairs in Seattle, the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition – the youthful Chilberg was its president -- opened June 1, 1909 and Century 21, April 21, 1962. Performers in both events stayed at the Washington. Most notable, of course, was Elvis Presley, here to film “Take Me To The Fair,” later released as “It Happened at the World’s Fair.”

When I lived in the Leschi neighborhood of Seattle, a hillside overlooking the middle part of Lake Washington, I would watch the boat traffic streaming away from the southern part of the lake following the Seafair hydroplane races, the crowning event of Seattle’s 72 year old summer festival. Though I knew there would be lots more good weather in front of us, actually the very best Northwest weather, the end of Seafair was a punctuation mark on the summer that somehow made me sad. I’d walk out of the garden and up the stairs to the kitchen where I’d get another beer, or more likely a glass of whiskey.

While I don’t live in that house above the lake anymore, I have that same feeling of sadness at the end of Seafair and, for some reason, decided my familiarity with the history of Seafair needed some work and I took my whiskey over to my laptop when the blues came. It didn't take long to blow past Seafair to its very interesting predecessor, Potlatch, sometimes called Golden Potlatch, a stop and start special event that began with great promise and some tragedy in the summer of 1911, seemed to gain a foothold in 1912, played host to a full bore riot in 1913 and was replaced with a choral music festival in 1915 after the Seattle Chamber of Commerce decided a better use of its money would be chasing conventions. Potlatch revived for a few years in the mid-thirties but was abandoned as World War II broke out.

When it ended in 1915, a former booster of the event, The Seattle Daily Times, said there was nothing to get upset about.

“Seattle has discovered and promoted with a commendable degree of success a happy substitute for the erstwhile, noisy and meaningless Potlatch.”

Festivals have always been markers – of time, accomplishment, our spiritual life.They were, in the fundamental meaning of the concept, a special event.Today, special events are more mundane -- business tactics, things we do to communicate ideas, to carry out commerce, to advocate, to create a purposeful unity.

Potlatch comes from Chinook Jargon, the trading language of tribes in the Northwest. It derives from a Nootka (Vancouver Island) word and described a celebration in which many people gathered together, feasted, gambled and made gifts, often lavish, to one another.

UW Libraries

The first Seattle Potlatch grew out of the civic energy generated by the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition that celebrated the Alaska Gold Rush and Seattle’s gateway role in the riches of the far north. Seattle’s connections to the tribes still had power back in the early part of the last century, perhaps because we had so overwhelmed them, as we had the forest, and they existed only in a pleasant myth. My old neighborhood, Leschi, was named after a chief, likely innocent, authorities had hung just sixty years before.

Planning for the event began in April with a meeting of worthies intent on raising enough money to make a good first impression. Mayor George Cotterill led off with his favorite topic, growing the city. “This year’s summer visitor is the advance agent of next year’s permanent resident.” Frank McDermott, leader of the Bon Marche, the most successful department store on the west coast, chimed in with “Cities are only learning what merchants learned long ago - that it pays to advertise.” “It helps put Seattle on the map,” said Joshua Green of the Inland Navigation Company. Blunt old Henry Broderick, the downtown real estate man, added: “The Potlatch will pay if you do. Mail your check now!”

﻿

Seattle Golf Club
UW Libraries

A prelude to opening day of the first Potlatch on July 17 was the Potlatch Golf Tournament, played at the new Seattle Golf Club, open at its present location since 1908. One of the more popular young businessmen in Seattle, George R. Andrews, Seattle manager of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, was set to play in the tournament on July 13th. He was good – just a couple of weeks earlier he won the Chapin Cup and the club championship in successive days.

He would have been known as a “good club man,” a popular joiner in the Seattle upper crust social scene. He and a number of friends had a small party at the golf club the night of the 12th which concluded about 10:00 PM. They left at about the same time with George insisting he was in a hurry to get back to his apartments in the New Washington Hotel downtown so he could be rested and ready to tee off early on the 13th.

They drove out onto Golf Club Road, George the second to last car out of the parking lot. One of the cars ahead had a mechanical problem and stopped at the city limits, then on 85th Street and perhaps four miles toward the city from the course. When the last car came along, ahead of George, his friends sensed something wrong and back-tracked for the club, finding some skid marks about a half mile from the club at a place called “The Dip,” an elevation change along the narrow, two lane road perched above a small but steep embankment.

They couldn’t see anything there until they picked up, in their headlights, the glint of broken glass. They slid down the ravine’s edge until they saw the car at the bottom and George at the foot of a stump, his neck broken. The skid marks and other clues suggested that Andrews was driving 60 miles an hour or so or before he flew off the road. One of his friends broke an axle while searching and another car was damaged while backing up, nearly rolling into the same ravine. There were many indicators that alcohol was involved, but the Seattle Daily Times, never a friend of governmental performance, blamed the road builder, King County, even bringing the Executive Director of the Good Roads Association to the site to evaluate the quality of the road. Seattle Daily Times Publisher Alden Blethen was a member of the club and his sons were pretty good at the game. He likely wished he would have exposed any problems of “The Dip” that he had driven over so many times before the accident.

Despite George's tragedy, they finished the tournament, out of deference to the many golfing visitors in town, but Potlatch never felt the same to Blethen or the Seattle Daily Times after the George Andrews tragedy and subsequent events.

Still, the first Potlatch was a hell of a party. It had many of entertainments we enjoy in today’s Seafair. A big parade, water sports, even something called a hydroplane, though it was really a float plane with wheels in its pontoons that could scoot the craft noisily along the ground.

There were nightly dances on the streets, a Chinese monster dragon dance and, in an unfortunate sentence “a Japanese feast of lanterns.”Those Japanese and their hot food!

Pergola at First and Yesler
Seattle Municipal Archives

Seattle’s Potlatch goals were fairly minimal – more growth, awareness of the city’s accomplishments. The city was working hard at gaining attention in 1911. In 1890, Tacoma and Seattle had about the same population, around 40,000 and the same basic interests – access to major transportation linkages via the railroads and ports. But Seattle exploded in the next two decades as it went on an annexation binge and had considerable organic growth as well. Suddenly, it seemed, Seattle was a big city with 250,000 people. It had pulled off a spectacularly successful world’s fair, but it still yearned for more attention. The first Potlatch did just that and the one the next year seemed even better.

UW Libraries

Every summer festival has its auxiliary group, fundraisers and boosters who support the event and march, in their white suits and shoes, in the big parade. Seafair has its “Commodores” formed five years after the first Seafair in 1950. The Potlatch had an auxiliary as well, Tilikums, another Chinook word meaning people who signify a nation. The Tilikums marched in something even more uncomfortable than a poorly fitted white suit. They wore great masks, really more like totem poles, over their white robes. The masks covered much of their body and must have been clumsy at the volunteer reception after the parade or, more likely, required a really big check room at the host hotel.

It looked like this event was on the rise in 1913, especially when Frank Baker, head of the National City Bank, committed to be the chairman at a luncheon held at the Moose Room of The Rathskeller restaurant.Baker would become the father of another Seattle banker, Miner Baker, who for many years provided the regional economic forecast at Seattle First National Bank and later served as a Seattle Port Commissioner.

There were no invitations sent out for the dinner, people just knew to come and, at a dollar plate, it was a big success. When Baker spoke, he promised an event that would be the best yet.

It was, in fact, a nightmare.

﻿

Alden J. Blethen, Publisher
Seattle Daily Times
UW Libraries

There are many complicated antecedents to what caused the 1913 Potlatch Riots. First, there was Colonel Blethen, who wore his heart on his masthead, where he sometimes described his publication as “An American Newspaper for Americans.” One of his goals, also on the masthead, was the defeat of Bolshevism, along with a 3,000,000 ton/year coking plant located in town.

The Industrial Workers of the World had Blethen’s version of America always in their sights and periodically would hold parades in front of the Daily Times offices, their Red Flag of the revolution on equal level with the Stars and Stripes.Of course, this infuriated Blethen.He believed that their continued organizing and speech making was dangerous, bad for business and un-American and he constantly pressured the mayor to run them out of town as other towns had done.

﻿

George Cotterill, Mayor
Seattle Municipal Archives

But the mayor and Colonel Blethen didn’t get along. Before becoming mayor, George Cotterill was the assistant to R. H. Thomson, the great city engineer whom Blethen thought was out of control, by and large true, and Blethen had him as a socialist as well because Thomson thought highly of public ownership. After the Great Seattle Fire, Thomson blamed the poor performance of the private water companies for the inability of the firefighters to put down the blaze. So, he created his own publicly-owned water department, building the city’s water system on the Cedar River, 30 miles from the town, hooking it up with wooden pipes. The dam he built to hold the municipal water supply led him to attach a power plant and run the stored water through its generators. The resulting city-owned electric company delivered significant value to the citizens of his town, the rate/kilowatt hour dropping from 20 cents to 10 cents in a handful of years. Not only was Cotterill connected to Thomson, but he had defeated Blethen’s pick, Hiram Gill, for mayor the year before.

So, when Blethen and the management of Potlatch wanted the IWW silenced and off the streets of Seattle, Cotterill refused.

There are several versions of how the riots began. One of them had a young female IWW supporter speaking to a largely IWW crowd on Washington Street in Pioneer Square. A few soldiers and sailors here for Potlatch and having a good time in the square's many bars came upon the scene and began heckling the speaker. She heckled back. At some point the soldiers took over the platform and shouted their points of view to the crowd, who shouted back.

The woman sought to get her platform back and they refused.She told them the platform was rented and she would be charged a premium if she did not return it on time, a point the military men who now had the box did not buy.There was a struggle, a fist was raised near the woman and one of the crowd stepped forward and decked a sailor.

IWW Hall
UW Collections

That night, after reading inflammatory accounts in the Daily Times about the incident, a mob consisting of soldiers, sailors and their friends busted up the IWW headquarters building as fights broke out everywhere. Other offices were ransacked, newsstands with Socialist and IWW materials were destroyed. Cotterill declared a civil emergency, cut off liquor sales and told Colonel Blethen that the only way he would publish another account of the troubles then ongoing was to have it reviewed prior to publication by the mayor.

Seattle Police then refused to let a Daily Times extra edition be circulated to newsboys gathered at the Times Building. The Times lawyers finally got an temporary injunction against Cotterill and his gag order.

By then troops had been federalized and the city was under martial law. Soldiers and sailors were sent to their ships and barracks. While additional violence was expected, it didn’t materialize, although it was clearly a precursor of truly bloody events in the remaining years of the decade -- the Everett and Centralia Massacres, the General Strike and hundreds of smaller incidents in the coal mine and lumbering towns across the state.

Absent from much of the coverage of the 1913 event was the accomplishment of a young woman, Alyn McKay, who set the altitude record for women in her small plane, rising above the mayhem below in lazy circles until she reached 2,900 feet which, at the time, seemed amazing.

Potlatch would have one more year, 1914, and disappear from the civic agenda. Blethen would exit the following year, dying July 13, 1915.

Monday, June 23, 2014

The Squire
Park neighborhood has one of those names you’d think was given by a savvy
developer hoping to communicate open space and the good life. In fact, however, it
was named after Watson C. Squire, a respected Territorial Governor of Washington
and a United States Senator after statehood.
Squire bought the land from the original Carson Boren land claim and
filed a plat in 1890, the year after Seattle’s Great fire. He had married well. His wife, Ida, was the granddaughter of
Eliphalet Remington who founded the gun company. Watson had worked at the company as a lawyer.

Squire Park
assembles along a section of Yesler Way, which a few decades earlier was also
the famous Skid Road, where the logs from Seattle’s virginal forest were skidded
by mule and horse down to Elliott Bay so they could be sawed up and shipped off to
places on the west coast that were, remarkably, growing even faster than
Seattle.

Everyone
figured there would be a boom after Seattle’s business district

burned down in
1889 and they were right. The great
clear cut formed by logging the Yesler forest provided an opportunity for
developers to build streetcars that led to parks they had built on Lake Washington so they could attract people to their real estate via a good time, picnics, and
even a little gambling. It was all about
these new, fun things like leisure time and money trickling down to a growing middle
class. Within twelve months of the
completion of the Yesler Streetcar Line, nearly 1600 homes were built within
three blocks of the line. By 1896,
another two lines were in place to the north of Yesler, homes popping up and
hugging the new transportation links. In 1900,
they were selling lots for about $250-$500, ready to build.

Squire Park in 1910 withProvidence Hospital in the background

The real
estate pages of the early Seattle Times exhibited the making of magic in Squire
Park, the kind of magic that transformed the idea of residence from a place above
the shoe and furniture stores in town to a real, single family house, possibly
with a boarder, but no less a real house.
At the turn of the century, Squire Park’s homes seemed within reach, a powerful and necessary reality
of residential real estate. It had potential, which was the message from
that nice Mr. J.W. Clise, who came to Seattle just after the big fire, saw
potential in Squire Park and bought and sold houses and land there alongside
Watson Squire and his son Philo.

William
Grose, an African American Pioneer, also saw potential in the housing boom.
He had lost his waterfront hotel, restaurant and tavern in the big fire
and decided to move

William Grose house, still standing, near
24th and Madison

back to a 12 acre farm he had purchased earlier from old Henry Yesler
himself just south of Madison Street and east of 23rd Avenue, a bit North and East of Squire Park.
He led development there and in the 1890s it became known as the “Colored
Colony,” home to many middle class blacks.
As Quintard Taylor, the University of Washington historian has written:

“By the
1890s, the handful of African-American entrepreneurs were far more integrated
into the city’s economy than their counterparts would be a century later. Black businesses were located throughout the
city and served a mostly white clientele.
For one brief moment in the 1890s, Seattle had more black attorneys than
ministers.”

On the other side of the neighborhood, the
southern end of Squire Park and a bit to the west, a large community of
Japanese was also growing in size and economic influence. It was called Japan Town. Some 3500 people lived in and around Squire
Park. Masajiro Furuya, the Japanese
banker and merchant, who partnered with two other Japanese businessmen to stage
the Japanese exhibit at the World’s Fair, lived in what is now the Yesler
Terrace Housing Project, just a couple of blocks from Washington Hall.

Together, they helped
contribute to the racial diversity we normally don’t equate with those times in
Seattle. To this, add the Scandinavian arrival to Squire Park, and the
construction of a building that served as a kind of settlement house for them and for everyone else in the neighborhood. It serves the same purpose todeay.

At the
western end of Squire Park, a couple of blocks off Yesler on 14th,
just down the street from the baseball park, home of the Clamdiggers, Siwashes, Chinooks, Turks and Giants, the Seattle team in the Northwest League, the Danish Brotherhood bought four
lots and built a lodge in 1908. The
Danes were part of the great migration from Europe that resulted in more than 60,000,000
Europeans leaving their native countries in the 100 years between 1830 and 1930. For parts of that 100 year span, the doors in
America were wide open.

More than a
1,000,000 Swedes, 800,000 Norwegians, 300,000 Danes and 230,000 Finns found
their way to America seeking opportunity through such remarkable laws as the
Homestead Act, a statute that brought the idea of land ownership into the
immigrant vocabulary. The Scandinavians
were also running from events at home.
Norwegians sought to escape conscription in the Russian Army. When Prussia took the province of Schleswig
Holstein from Denmark, a third of its 150,000 residents left for America,
having no desire to serve in the Prussian Army.

Germania Hall, Second and SenacaU. W. Collections

Early Scandinavian
immigration was largely to the Midwest but people kept moving west across the
northern tier of America. Along the way,
they formed associations to keep their culture and customs and ease the bumps
and stumbles that came with their new lives in America. In Omaha, early immigrants who had fought in
the US Civil War and the Danish-Prussian War formed the Danish Brotherhood in
1882, just as Danish immigration was peaking.
Six years later, the Danish community in Seattle opened a chapter and
began looking to build a permanent lodge.
By 1902 there were 185 members and they met in various lodges like the
Carpenters’ Union Hall or Germania Hall, the great German Lodge located at 2nd
and Seneca.

Officers of Danish BrotherhoodUW Collections

In June of
1908 they dedicated their lodge in Squire Park and named it after their new
home state. Besides the meeting and
entertainment spaces, they built single rooms where new residents could stay while
they looked for more permanent places. There were 450 members of the Brotherhood
that year and an equivalent number attached to the Danish Sisterhood. In recognition of the Seattle chapter’s
accomplishments and robust growth, T. P.
Nielson, the lodge’s president, was voted in as national president of
the Brotherhood in 1910.

UW Collections

The year
1910 was an extraordinary year in Seattle’s history and in the history of America’s
immigration. The world’s fair, the
Alaska Yukon Pacific Exhibition, had closed at the end of 1909. It left Seattle’s citizens with a feeling
that they now lived in a new city, a place of international consequence. In one sense, it certainly was. In 1910, one in four of residents had been born
in another country.

That year, Squire
Park was becoming even more diverse. Jews
were settling into Squire Park, speaking German, Yiddish and Ladino, the Spanish-Judeo
language of Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain. All of these Jewish groups used Washington
Hall as a temporary synagogue while they built their permanent synagogues up
the street. Some of these Jewish
residents began calling Squire Park another name -- “The Village” -- because it
reminded them of the cohesive enclaves they had left behind in Poland,
Germany, Rhodes and Turkey.

Even though
Chinese people in Seattle had been pushed out under the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882 and by vigilante action the Exclusion Act inspired, 900 or so remained in
Seattle in 1910, most living nearby the Hall.
Ironically, Watson Squire was territorial governor when those terrible
events occurred. In Tacoma, hundreds of
Chinese were herded onto a ship and sent to San Francisco.

Hazel Dixon stands by a Packard in 1914. Behind her is her house built by pioneer William Grose, her husband'sAfrican American Heritige Society

Around the time of statehood, African Americans lived in all of Seattle’s 14 wards, but, in
1910, nearly all 3,200 lived in the Central District and Squire Park. Yesler Way
and the Squire Park Neighborhood looked and sounded a lot like Seattle today,
many cultures and languages populating the streets – nearly 12,000 Blacks, Jews,
Chinese and Japanese congregating near Washington Hall.Soon they would be joined by several thousand
Filipinos whose country had become a territory of the United States after the
Spanish-American War, meaning that citizens of the Philippines would be able to
travel more freely to the US because they weren’t considered aliens. Though
only 17 Filipinos lived in Seattle in 1910, they were poised to become
the newest and largest group of people to move in close by Washington
Hall.Seattle was 97% white in 1910, but
in the little melting pot of Squire Park, it was almost okay to look and sound a bit
different.

In the
several decades after it was built, Washington Hall became identified as much
with the adjacent residents as it was with people hailing from Denmark. The managers of the hall happily rented it for
dances, potlucks, plays in many languages, marriages, concerts. It was the center of so many communities that
one set of faces streaming out into the sunshine with their smiles and laughter
would run into another set of faces, somber as they entered, prepared to eulogize a
leader or listen to a speaker with an important topic.

1910 was
also important to this community because for the first time, the national
government began a major, systematic accounting of the immigration policies of
the past. It came in the form of the
Dillingham Commission, a joint committee of Congress that spent four years
studying immigration policy and government action between 1820 and 1910.

Vermont Senator WilliamDillingham

Appointed
by President Theodore Roosevelt, the commission would have called itself progressive
in its political thinking, but most political thinking in those days had racial
and cultural blind spots. The
Progressive liked to think that progress in the country was linked to the
perceived strength of the new immigrants, concepts like “good stock” or people
who were “socially ready for assimilation.”
In other words, their bias was to northern Europeans over those from
southern Europe and to white people over yellow, brown or black, or those from Eastern
Europe. Their goal was assimilation and
they believed that only certain people were able to assimilate. At the same time, the diverse Squire Park
residents worked hard to assimilate, but worked as well to keep their
cultures, religions and languages intact.

The
commission did its work over four years and its volumes of background and
recommendations formed the rationale for many future changes in immigration law. By
1917 and twice in the twenties, big years for immigration reform, literacy tests for all people over 16
were in place. The law defined as undesirable people with certain illnesses or
mental defects. South Asia immigrants
were barred from immigrating along with many others from across the Pacific. While not in statute, a “gentleman’s agreement”
between the government of Japan and the United States made it illegal for
Japanese to emigrate to the United States. The quotas then in place favored northern
Europeans and reduced significantly southern and eastern Europe immigration.

The end run
around all these restrictions to immigration from the Pacific was the
territorial status of the Philippines.
Philippine people had few restrictions to entry. They were not aliens and needed no passport
to come to America. Also, the signals
sent to Filipino men and women were decidedly mixed about opportunities in the
United States. Fighting a bloody
revolution by Filipinos who wanted independence immediately, the Governor General
of the territory, William Howard Taft, put his own progressive values to work
winning the hearts and minds of young Filipino people.

Seeking a
pro-American elite in the country, many young people were invited to a program
in the United States that placed young Filipinos in American colleges. The University of Washington was a popular
destination for these children, largely from educated upper classes of
Philippine society who had the educational preparation that would help them
succeed in US universities. Taft also
championed land reform and educational access to other, less fortunate people
in the Philippines. For example, under
Taft’s leadership, the US purchased large plots of land from the Philippine Catholic
Church which were redistributed to people in rural areas.

Carlos Bulosan

One person
who observed these actions while growing up on a Philippine farm harbored a hopeful view of America. He was Carlos Bulosan, a 17 year who was plenty smart but also burdened with a
bumpkin’s naiveté. When he arrived in
Seattle, in 1930, he had no idea of the Dickensian horrors he would find after
he got off the boat. Two days after
arriving, Bulosan told the hotel clerk at the hotel where he was staying that
he didn’t think he could pay his tab in full.
The clerk had a way to fix that.
He sold Carlos to two tough nut Filipino labor contractors who, in no
time, had Bulosan on a boat to Alaska where he would work in the salmon
canneries for next to nothing.

A gifted
writer, though he did not yet know it, he worked along the west coast at hard
and low paying jobs through The Great Depression, finally getting sick in
California where he was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Then, for a few years, he wrote about his
immigrant perceptions of America, marveling at how the country could be so
cruel and at the same time so kind, revealing at one time so much opportunity
and so little, so much compassion, so much hate. He became a labor organizer, but died at 42. America is in the Heart is a book that
needs reading if you are interested in understanding any immigrant experience.

In the
thirties, Seattle did not have the racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws that existed
in other parts of the country, but there was a Jim Crow culture that effectively
determined where different races would work, live, eat and play. There were two musician unions in town, a
white union which played in the theaters and lounges in the downtown where the
money was good and a black union that played in the clubs along Jackson Street
and the bars in Squire Park and the Central District. Big touring bands like Duke Ellington played Washington
Hall but could really play any hall in town. But a great regional band like Edythe Turnham's Knights of Syncopation hung out on Jackson Street or played Washington Hall. It took some time to open the doors of the Trianon or the Ice Arena.

Edythe Turnham and her Knights of SyncopationUniversity of Washington Collectoins

After, they
would look for a place to play for fun and they would head for the cool joints
along Jackson and Yesler Streets. The
pianist Overton Berry once had a black night club that became popular with these
musicians. It was exciting, the big
names and great players of the American Negro musical world, but Overton’s
stage was so small that the musicians had to find a seat in the audience which
is where they played, delighting and sometimes surprising the patrons.

The segregated music scene ended in 1958 under pressure from the Century 21 World's Fair leadership, who did not their portrayal of the 21st Century marred by segregation. In fact, Overton Berry was hired to bring more black musicians to the fair grounds. In the closing scene of "It Happened at the World's Fair," for example, where the band marches through playing Elvis' highly forgettable "Happy Endings," Berry and others were drafted to carry instruments because the sharp eyes of the fair organizers saw too few African Americans in the band.

Once the
Jewish immigrants in Squire Park had built their synagogues and didn’t need
Washington Hall as a temporary place of worship, they continued renting it for

UW Collections

touring speakers and singers who served these smaller, special communities
around the country with old world, ethnic
music, frequently in Yiddish, German and Ladino. Especially
well-known among Sephardic residents was the drama produced by Morris Eskenazy
and Leon Behar, both known as great wits, playwrights and actors. Productions
of Ladino drama continued into the 1950s.

Young Filipinos Dance at Washington Hallin the 40sUW Collections

A feature
of immigrant life is loneliness. Men
frequently outnumbered women, especially at the beginning of an immigration
wave. Filipinos used the hall for dances
and mixers, recruiting girls from all over the farming and fishing communities
across the region. Japanese would work
on their loneliness by spending time at Mr.
Furuya’s farm and country home on Bainbridge Island where workers and students
were welcome. One of Furuya’s two
daughters was a highly accomplished violinist and likely would have played at
Washington Hall, though I have not yet found a record of it.

After Pearl
Harbor, the Japanese residents rented the hall to organize their own civil
defense procedures to both show their patriotism and contribute to

the
community’s defense. It didn't work. On Tuesday, May 5,
1942, Washington Hall became the center of the continued Japanese evacuation of
Western Washington. The announcement was
made by the west coast military command that the remaining Japanese in Seattle –
the pre-war population was 7,000 in Seattle and 10,000 in Washington state -- would
have to register at Washington Hall on Wednesday and Thursday and be
transported by bus to Camp Harmony at the Puyallup Fairgrounds. They arrived on May 11 and would later be
sent to Minidoka, Idaho in August. Other
Seattle Japanese would be sent by train to Pinedale, a camp near Sacramento and
then on to Manzinar. Japanese living in
Kent were told to register while a decision had not yet been made about when Japanese
living in Auburn would be register. These events would bring the number of
Japanese evacuated to 55,000. When it
was finished, 110,000 Japanese living in the west had been interned.

LA Times

Among the registrants were Japanese farmers in the Kent Valley.
About 150 Japanese-owned farms and dairies operated there. An official assured residents of the state that
because ownership of the farms was being transferred to Filipino and white
farmers, no loss of produce was expected.

There is a
constant echo in today’s newspapers emanating from the American tragedy of
Japanese internment. The published
obituaries of Japanese people today follow a mostly similar format. The lead paragraph tells the story of a full
life and loving character. The second
paragraph almost always mentions their internment for three years from 1942 to
1945 and where they were imprisoned. The
third paragraph, for the males, usually mentions military service in the
European Theater.

World War
II, in fact, changed the face of Squire Park for more people than the
Japanese. Few Japanese returned to
Squire Park, their numbers in Seattle today are about the same as in 1942. The great African American diaspora,
accelerated by the wartime industries in the Northwest, brought many African American people to
Squire Park and the Central District. In
fact, the movement of African Americans was comparable to the Oregon,
California and Santa Fe trails in the covered wagon days, about 1.6 million
people finding their way across the country.
By 1960, the migration topped 3,000,000 people.

Housing
covenants conspired to keep black people in Squire Park and the Central
District, though federal wartime housing opened new opportunities to the south
of Squire Park, in the Rainier Valley. In
1970, the Central District and Squire Park had become 72% African American, the
earlier populations moving on to somewhere else. Synagogues were repurposed as clinics and arts centers. Today, however, the white population in the
Central District is about 60% and African Americans total about 30%. The African American population has shifted
mainly south and southeast, frequently to the King County suburbs there.

Jews tended
to move out of Squire Park and into Southeast Seattle neighborhoods like Mount
Baker, Seward Park and across Lake Washington into neighborhoods like Bellevue
and Mercer Island.

With racial
and religious covenants illegal, the choices of later waves of immigrants were
not confined to Squire Park and the Central Area. Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hispanics and
Pacific Islanders tended to choose the southern part of of Seattle as well as close in suburban
towns like Tukwila, Renton and Kent as their first home, though many chose to
go east of Lake Washington to suburbs there. Today, the suburb of Bellevue, on the east
side of Lake Washington, has the highest population of foreign born in
Washington state, 30%.

The Danish
Brotherhood gave up on Washington Hall during the seventies. It was expensive to maintain, no longer
centrally located to their membership and the neighborhood had changed so
much. They sold it to a Black Masonic organization,
The Worshipful Sons of Haiti, in 1973. It not only provided a home to the black
Masons, but also to waves of avant garde performers whose first priority in choosing a performance venue was the cost of the hall.

As another wave of change washed around the building, King County’s Arts and Cultural Agency, 4Culture and Historic
Seattle purchased the building in 2009 and Historic Seattle, which holds the
mortgage, is leading an effort to rehabilitate the building and create a place
in the community as vital and necessary as when it was first built.

In addition
to acquisition of the property and stabilization of the building's basics, historic Seattle has fixed
the building’s roof and is now raising money for a seismic retrofit, American’s
With Disability Act compliance and finishes finishing of the interior
spaces. It’s about a $10,000,000 project.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

It started with a lunch conversation about World War II with an old friend, then got more complicated with a trip down to Palm Springs to duck out of the rain. While there, a martini and steak at a place from the twenties called Melvyn’s, led to thinking about early golf courses in the desert and that turned into golf at a place that could be a museum. That's why the forties and fifties are inhabiting my mind this week.

My friend had served in World War II as a young Pharmacist Mate in Beaumont, California, a few miles west of Palm Springs. Built as a hospital to serve George Patton’s Desert Warfare School, it had been turned over to the Navy as a convalescent center, mainly for people who had been seriously injured in combat or had been treated and needed physical and emotional rehabilitation and other services before discharge. There were many men there who had what the military used to call psychoneurosis, shell shock, or, as the military in 1944 preferred to say, “battle fatigue” and what we now tend to call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The military had thought it had learned a great deal from the psychological effects of combat during World War I and had used intense psychological screening to eliminate nearly a million and a half men from service in World War II. But World War II rates of battle fatigue were two to three times higher than in World War I. Nearly one in five soldiers returned to the continental United States because of emotional damage, overwhelming the psychiatric capabilities of US caregivers. World War I was fought in western Europe and the US forces were there for just a year. World War II was fought over four years, all across the world, sometimes with no time to recuperate physically and mentally. And, of course, better war technology made it more normal for people to break down. There were also far more prisoners of war in World War II.

The transfer of Beaumont from the Army to the Navy likely came about because Navy leadership was looking for resting stations to meet a widely

anticipated order that came in 1944 from President Roosevelt. The President had become upset that men were being discharged from the Army without the full array of care he believed was owed them. His order made it clear that

Beaumont Convalescent Center, 1944

every soldier needed to be put back right. No overseas casualty was to be discharged from the service until he had received ‘the maximum benefits of hospitalization and convalescent care including psychological rehabilitation, vocational guidance, pre-vocational training and re-socialization.’ Former Senator Bob Dole is a terrific example of this policy. He was a Second Lieutenant in 1944 and badly wounded in Sicily. He was not discharged from the Army's care until 1948.The medical system built to support World War II is still astounding today. As described in a recent Rand Corporation history, the 1939 version of the United States Army had 190,000 soldiers supported medically by 1,100 doctors, 64 administrative personnel, almost 700 nurses and 9,400 enlisted men. Two years later, the Army had 1,500,000 people in uniform and there were more than 10,000 doctors and 5,500 nurses. In 1944, there are 8,000,000 army troops, 45,000 doctors, 40,000 nurses and 540,000 enlisted men. How did they do that?

Over a similar period of time, the Navy troop strength grew from just over 200,000 people to 4,000,000 by VJ Day with a similar rise in medical caregivers.

At the same time, the Army had to address the President’s order and create systems that gave soldiers what their country owed them medically, psychiatricly and educationally. My friend Armand, then a kid of 19, was sent to a barren place called Beaumont, an empty hillside with leaky, spare, temporary buildings. Other facilities that served this function were much better. Some soldiers were sent to the Yosemite Park Lodge, the Hotel Casa Del Ray in Santa Cruz, the Narconian in Corona, California, the Arrowhead Resort in San Bernadino, the Sonoma Mission Inn at Boyes Springs and the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, once a center for the Hollywood crowd who liked to come to the desert for the weather, among other things.

The wartime role of celebrities was largely morale and fundraising and most worked hard at it. Many stars found their way to combat, but most stuck to entertainment of the men and the sale of war bonds. War bonds were a good priority for the military. In three years between 1942 and 1945, Americans purchased $150 billion in war bonds, a major contribution to the cost of the war and much of it due to the celebrity of the sales people.

My friend was in Beaumont in 1945, the last year of its temporary life. Then, it was home to 250 people in convalescent care. He says that many people died there because of their significant injuries and illnesses. By the end of 1945 it was gone -- scrapped and sold off. A Rand Corporation history of the country’s military medicine was published in 2013 and is attached below. It shows, among many other things, that the dismantling of the war was as breathtaking as the run up to it.

At the time of the Japanese surrender in September of 1945, the Army, including the Army Air Force, stood at just over 8,000,000 men and women on active duty and another 4,000,000 in the Navy. By the end of the year, Army and Navy manpower was half of that. Six months later it stood at under 2,000,000. By the end of 1947 the US Army strength was at 925,000 men and women and the Navy about 400,000.

At the same time, obligations of the military leadership shifted to the Veteran’s Administration. There were more than 16,000,000 World War II vets and another 2,000,000 veterans from other wars who needed the services that veterans need.

The Rand history says:

“To serve this flood, the VA had 97 hospitals in 45 states and the District of Columbia with a capacity of 81,333 beds, including 10,243 emergency beds…To augment this, work was underway on an additional 27,274 beds at 31 new hospitals with another 29,100 beds in planning. The VA employed approximately 65,000 people.”

Amid this cascade of activity as millions of people were moving about the country

figuring out what to do with the rest of their lives, Pharmacist Mate Armand Guarino, a native of Beverly, Massachusetts, decided to go to Los Angeles and look around, maybe catch a play. He caught a ride to downtown Beaumont and stuck his thumb out where the highway from Palm Springs to LA shot through the town. Marie Wilson, an actress soon to be a star, pulled her little roadster to the side of the road and said "Hey, sailor! Going to LA?" She was 29. He was 19.He soon found out which play he was going to -- the review Marie was starring in, "Ken Murray's Blackouts," one of the longest running entertainments in theater history, was racking up nearly 4,000 performances over seven years.Ken Murray's career had a half life of about one week when he coaxed some investors to bankroll an idea that came from his life in Vaudeville. The blackout was a term that described the lights going out just as the performer delivered a punch line. The term got a double meaning from the war, where blackouts had a totally fresh and immediate meaning. The show was naughty, sexy and sexist. And it was a smash hit.Marie played the dumb blond, an idea she migrated to when she made a shrewd observation that to survive in show business, she had to distinguish herself from the hundreds of other attractive women in Hollywood who also possessed voluptuous bodies like hers.

She had a comedic temperament and played to that strength. So while the dumb blond was a tough strategic decision to make, it was an easy one to implement. She wanted in the business and the cost of entry at the moment seemed small. She ultimately found her place, smart as she was, and it both made and possessed her career.

In the show, Murray was the wry, cigar smoking commentator who would leer at Marie and lead the audience to Marie's breasts through the dialogue. Here’s an example of one scene on the show. Murray asks her “what’s new?” She would say that she had been reading a study about the advantages of using mothers’ milk over bottled milk. When prompted to tell what they advantages were, she’d reply:

"Well, it doesn't need refrigerating — the cats can't get at it — and, best of all, it comes in such cute containers."Blackout!

Armand and Marie became pals. He’d come to LA and the doorman at the El Capitan Theater knew to let him in and he’d watch the show from the wings.

She was married then to her second husband, Allan Nixon, but living apart and seeking a divorce in 1945, something that required residency in Nevada, a complicating factor for a woman performing ten times a week in Los Angeles and trying to advance her career in movies. Nixon was a former Washington Redskins football player and sometime actor who sold gossip to rags like Photoplay and Confidential. He was also rough with his women and likely was with her.She had friends in Palm Springs and would dash out to the desert when she could get away from the show. On the way, she’d pick up her little sailor and bring him along for the ride. He remembers particularly Ralph Bellamy at a Palm Springs party, the soon to be black listed writer Dalton Trumbo and his wife on a visit to Los Angeles. Over his year at Beaumont, he met the full Hollywood crowd that Marie Wilson knew. And the crowd loved young men in uniform.

“I don’t recall ever buying a drink while I was in the Navy,” he said. “And damned few meals.”

Once free from the “Blackouts of Hollywood,” Marie went on to real stardom

playing “My Friend Irma” on the radio starting in April of 1947. That role also also had a long run, seven years on radio and finally closing in 1954 as both a radio program and a television series, both strong ratings performers. They were the first films to feature Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, a night club act that needed national exposure and did pretty well with it.

There were two movies. “My Friend Irma” in 1949 and “My Friend Irma Goes West” in 1950. Marie plays Irma Peterson, a Minnesota native. Her roommate, Jane Stacy and Irma are young single women sharing an apartment and many misadventures with men. Jane is the narrator of Irma’s bewildering life as a secretary who can’t be fired because the filing system she has created is intelligible only to her. Natch, she has a deadbeat boyfriend who is trying to get rich quick and not commit to Irma. Jane, on the other hand, is sweet and smart, and on the edge of marrying a wealthy boyfriend.

“Irma, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I became Mrs. Richard Rheinlander the Third?”

“What good would that do if he has two other wives?”

Palm Springs has been synonymous with Hollywood since the earliest days of

the last century. The silent movies used Palm Springs backgrounds extensively for stars like Rudolf Valentino and Theda Bara. Clara Bow was a silent movie regular in Palm Springs.

In the thirties, forties and fifties, Palm Springs exploded in celebrity. Hollywood movie contracts at the time required actors to be available within two hours of notification by their producer that they were needed for some task. At eighty miles, Palm Springs was enough distance from LA's insanity and close enough to honor your contract, especially with the cars getting better and better roads built.

As the colony developed there, particularly around the Movie Colony District

Bob Hope's First Home in Palm Springs

out near the airport, homes were relatively modest. Bob Hope’s first home, built in 1936 and about 2,000 square feet, for example, sold for just under $500,000 in 2012. Taking into account that the Hollywood residents were young, talented and relatively well paid young men and women in the entertainment business, the lifestyle was relatively simple as well -- alcohol, sex, golf, tennis, horseback riding. Sure they had great fun surfing the hotel bars, but they were mostly appreciated by the locals and were rarely hassled. Palm Springs was the kind of little town many of them were originally from, and they found a sense of community there, staging golf and bowling tournaments for their causes, most of them local. They cared for the soldiers and sailors like Armand who were thrown into their midst, some of them bewildered and terrified by combat and some, like Armand, off to Harvard, MIT, Tufts and a career in biochemistry.

While we were there, we spent a couple of nights at the bar of Melvyn’s, a

place with great forties and fifties cred and attached to the Ingleside Hotel, a small, elegant place built as a private estate in the late twenties for Henry Birge, the owner of the Pierce Arrow Company. It was later purchased by an energetic woman named Ruth Hardy and converted to a twenty room hotel. The hotel didn't take reservations unless the guests were invited by Ms. Hardy. It is there that Howard Hughes, registering as his pilot, spent several nights with Ava Gardner, by far my favorite celebrity, who also spent time in Palm Springs with Frank Sinatra, whose home, Twin Palms, she shared for a time. Gloria Swanson's house was just down the street when the Ingleside was constructed.

Sorting out the relationships of the movie colony could be confusing. In Esther Williams’ Memoir, “Million Dollar Mermaid,” she describes a dinner event. Fernando Llamas comes in escorting two of Bandleader Artie Shaw’s ex-wives, Ava Gardner and Lana Turner.

"Ava and Lana were pals," Williams writes, "and Ava at this time was in the midst of her stormy marriage to Frank Sinatra. About six years early, however, Lana had been labeled a "homewrecker over her involvement with Frank, when he was still married to his first wife, Nancy. Both Lana and Ava had been ardently pursued by Howard Hughes, and Lana had had a brief affair with Victor Mature.”

But what happened after that dinner reveals the tortured path of Hollywood Colony matrimony.

“Lana and Fernando broke up and she married Lex Barker after he divorced Arlene Dahl. Following his affair with Lana and Arlene’s divorce from Lex (likely for messing with Lana's daughter), Fernando married Arlene, who became the mother of his son, Lorenzo. Arlene eventually divorced Fernando and then he and I were married.” It's really pretty simple, though it does require a focused mind. The state of Washington has numerous connections to Palm Springs, but the one that interests me most is the relationship developed by Monrad C. Wallgren, a former Washington state Congressman, Senator and Governor. An Everett optometrist and jeweler, Walgren was the ultimate joiner, very popular and a terrific athlete. He was a low handicap golfer and a national class billiards player, winning the national amateur championship at the Everett Elks Hall in 1929.

He’s the only politician in the state's history to serve in the US House of Representatives, the US Senate and as Governor of the state. Despite the

The President and Wallgren at a parade in
Tacoma, 1948. Note Warren Magnuson
just above Truman's hat.

strong Republican tilt to the Second Congressional District, Wallgren was elected in 1932 and served four terms in the House. It was his bill that approved creation of the Olympic National Park in 1938. He was appointed United States Senator in 1940 after Senator Lewis Schwellenbach was picked to be a federal judge. Wallgren's greatest accomplishment in the Senate was to become close friends with then Senator Harry Truman with whom he served on the committee investigating military contracts during the war.

After service in the Senate, Wallgren ran for governor in 1944 and beat the dour Arthur B. Langlie. Even though his friend Harry Truman’s great upset in 1948 had coattails across the country, Langlie turned the tables and defeated Wallgren that year. Immediately after the 48 upset, Wallgren was very prominent at the West Palm Beach vacation White House and apparently with good reason. Truman appointed him Chairman of the National Security Resources Board, a very big

Senator Stuart Symington on Truman's right
and Wallgren to his left. Palm Beach vacation
White House ten days after the 1948 upset.
A young Clark Clifford, the campaign manager, is
just behind Symington.

job then. Many considered it too big a job for someone whose qualifications were based on his friendship with Harry Truman. Also, it should be said, most southern democrats used the appointment to send a message to the President – 'moderate your civil rights agenda.'After several months, the appointment seemed hopeless and Wallgren withdrew. Though a safer appointment to the Federal Power Commission followed, his political career was over.

The digging of dirt during the Republican effort to derail his nomination unearthed a charge that ended up with a Drew Pearson commentary, leaked by Washington Senator Harry Cain, a republican, that claimed Wallgren had won $50,000 in a crap game at a Palm Desert Resort named Shadow Mountain and was spending a lot of time in the desert.

While he did have a place there, Wallgren claimed the charge was specious.

His wife, Mabel, had sinus issues and the dry weather helped. Wallgren was certainly early to the desert. I found an old newspaper that had a picture of the Wallgren house under construction. It is the only thing other than desert in the frame.

After reading this about Wallgren, I called and got a 2:30 tee time and drove out to his early course, Shadow Mountain, and enjoyed the scale of the forties and fifties development there. It is quite different from desert development now. The golf course layout, designed by professional golfer Gene Sarazen, is short but tricky. The greens are small, most sitting atop a sharply slopped mound, very hard to hold unless you can bounce it along the fairway and trickle the ball on.

The houses located around the course are modest as well. Low slung, 1200

Wallgren's former home in Palm Desert

square feet or less. It was created at a time when the income gap between the middle class and the upper class was relatively smaller. And developers played to the middle class. An Associated Press story in 1949 said the annual golf course membership fee was going to be $100/year and that the bungalows around the course were available at $10/night. The headline of the piece says “Desert Club Offers Loafing For Middle Class – and Millionaires.” Celebrities who invested in and joined there in 1949 included Bette Davis, Robert Montgomery, Edgar Bergen, Dick Powell, Harold Lloyd and Kay Kaiser. Two years ago, the course and neighborhood became the first designated Palm Desert Historical site.

Today’s club has its drawbacks, including its 8 to 5 hours, highly unusual in the golf world. I found Wallgren’s address, two blocks up the street, and walked over to check out the house. It is also modest in scale, even with what appears to be a significant addition.

When we got back from Wallgren’s old house, golf course staff were scurrying to close the gates at five. Walking back to our car near the now empty

clubhouse, I came upon a boulder with a bronze plaque on it near a poorly traveled corner of the building. I could barely make out the words.

They got the plaque on the rock just in time.Walgreen was driving to Olympia in 1961 and had a flat tire at the southern edge of the Nisqually Bridge. A Fort Lewis soldier stopped to help out. The soldier was killed instantly when the drunk driver’s car plowed into them. Wallgren died two months later.

Marie Wilson also had a tragic death, too young, at 56, from cancer, never really breaking free of the caricature that made and stifled her career.

When Beaumont closed, the Navy sent Armand home to Beverly, Massachusetts and paid for his tuition when he got into Harvard University. It cost $400 a year. He retired as Dean of the Graduate School of the University of Texas Medical School at San Antonio and now lives in Port Townsend with his wife, Sally.